We, the People. Albie Sachs
go with its overthrow, will be winning its last victory?
We cannot recapture the élan and conviction of the earlier period. We should not even try. It is as though the political and social pluralism that we now acknowledge in a diverse civil society reflects itself in a corresponding deconcentration and dispersion of our joy.
There is no moment of victory, no VE [Victory in Europe] Day (when we celebrated the defeat of Nazism and end of the Second World War). We move with emotional difficulty from the heroic project of insurrection on a certain day, to the banal scheme of creating good government over a period of time. Is this what all the dreams and pain were for?
Were we wrong in the dark and bitter days of the 1960s and 1970s to declare ‘no middle road’? Today we are on the middle road, we help to construct it, eager to demonstrate the broadness of our vision. We even accept it as praise to be called flexible, though we might still flinch a little at being referred to as moderate.
And what is it about authority that causes so many of us to turn our backs on it? The truth is that a great number of us are as fearful of winning as we are of losing. We are confronted with crises of lifestyle. We find ourselves torn from old networks and plunged into new ones.
What is it that we are afraid of?
The dangers as I see them are of a subtle kind, as befits a country that is really far more sophisticated than one would believe from the bizarre caricatures of our people that still unfortunately seem to inhabit the imaginations of most whites.
I worry that the years of protracted struggle will have made us intellectually weary, so that our principal objective becomes that of getting into office and little more.
We should not, of course, underestimate the symbolic value simply of having a government based on majority rule. It is the visible embodiment of the achievement of our slogan: freedom in our lifetime. It is the foundation for allowing a country at peace with itself to evolve. It is the key to South-Africanising South Africa. Indeed, for many of us, taking part in the first democratic elections will be the highpoint of our lives. Yet voting, and even winning the elections, is not enough.
We need a programme, not just the words of a programme, but an actual programme, a coherent programme based on a clear vision, one that will function and that will proceed rapidly and systematically to improve the lives of those who have suffered the most under apartheid.
I fear for intellectual fatigue, a loss of imagination and élan, a gradual descent into an ad hoc approach and improvisation.
We are correctly concerned about not making promises that we cannot fulfil. Perhaps this is the good that comes out of disaster, that emanates from the collapse of unsustainable dreams of perfection. Yet the poor are still poor, the oppressed still oppressed.
We enter the Union Buildings and take our places in parliament, sing the longest anthem in the world, with verses from ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and ‘Die Stem’, win debate after debate, pass law after law, and still the poor remain poor and the oppressed oppressed.
We become masters and mistresses of defending our positions, explaining away our inability to tackle the problems of the country. We refer quite correctly to the terrible legacy of apartheid and the continuing resistance of the civil service, the selfishness of the business sector and the drag on progress imposed by all the many conservative elements in the country.
Deprived of the vision that we once thought would solve everything at a stroke, and reluctant to replace it with what we had formerly rejected as reformist solutions, we end up with nothing, and the poor remain poor and the oppressed oppressed.
We commemorate days of heroic memory, give each other decorations of one sort or another, remind the people of the years of struggle and sacrifice, launch campaign after highly publicised campaign to deal with all the problems of the country, and the poor still stay poor and the oppressed still stay oppressed.
Having resisted the bullets and bombs of lead, we now face the bullets and bombs of sugar, and slowly we succumb to their sweetness. A job for a friend here, a place for a relative there. Advance knowledge of government decisions, buying up land, directing contracts.
After all, the Nationalists did it to great effect, not to help themselves, of course, but to assist the Afrikaner people. Now-it’s-our-turn-ism takes over from ad-hoc-ism. There is no form of corruption that we will be inventing, every variety will already have been used in what will be referred to by some as the good old days. We will simply be carrying on the well-tried practices of previous governments.
If all power corrupts, then people’s power corrupts in a popular way. A lucre continua! The poor become angry, the oppressed chafe. We point out that it is not through adventurist actions that they will get their rights, that they must take their place in the queue like everybody else. They are obstinate, occupy land, go on strike, refuse to pay taxes. We send in the police, lock up the persons who are agitating them, appeal for national unity, remind them of the struggle.
We have achieved a great victory. We have deracialised oppression. We have done something that apartheid never succeeded in doing – we have legitimised inequality.
The rich man’s fart smells sweet. May it never happen in South Africa that if a once noble veteran of the struggle passes wind, the people declare: what a victory.
The beautiful people are not yet born. Ayi Kwei Armah was right. He might have added: nor will they ever be. Each generation struggles to produce its own beautiful people. We can inherit riches or poverty, power or oppression, but beauty, never. We have to find it in ourselves, generation after generation.
Perfectibility and Corruptibility
FROM TOWARDS A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR SOUTH AFRICA: ADVANCING HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA | OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 1992
The human rights concept is based in its substance on human perfectibility and in its procedures on human corruptibility. That is why constitutions are optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. They encourage us to choose the best among us as our leaders, but prepare us for the fact that they may turn out to be the worst.
It cannot be repeated too frequently: all constitutions are based on mistrust. The more devoted we are to our leaders and our organisations, the more we have to be constitutionally mistrustful of them.
It is not only the rascals, corrupt persons and assassins from the past whom we have to mistrust. Nor do we merely have to beware of the millions of so-called ordinary people who have become so steeped in the values and assumptions of apartheid society that they automatically replicate them in slightly disguised form in the post-apartheid world.
We have to mistrust ourselves.
This is not to say that we must see our role only as that of critics permanently in the opposition. Someone has to take responsibility for helping our country regather its strength and begin to function in a decent way for the benefit of all. Nor should any of us regard ourselves as being somehow more holy, more sensitive, more progressive than anyone else.
We do what we are good at. Some of us are good at picking up the human dimension of a problem, at sensing dilemmas and difficulties. We enjoy searching through words and phrases till we find the ones we want. Sometimes we even invent new words if that helps us. We are not afraid to be called romantics and idealists. We know that we can afford to be soft because there are enough hard people around. We judge no one else, in fact we admire persons who have qualities opposite to ours.
What matters is that we do not pretend iron qualities we do not possess, nor do we eliminate any special characteristics we might have for the sake of blending unnoticed into the collective. Rather, we express our thoughts as they come to us. The pleasure lies in placing them in the mix of ideas, sure that they will interact and clash with the thoughts of others. We take our stand on the right to enjoy the right to be wrong; that is, the right to have the satisfaction of advancing an idea and seeing it refuted by a better one.
We are